For people who use different statuses (i.e. some public and some private folders) it makes sense to somehow indicate which are which by using visual icons. However, for people who have all of their folders private and do not collaborate, the diamonds are really annoying and make the screen much more cluttered - they also attract the eye and become very distracting. Please remove them - or at least create a setting that allows users to choose whether or not they want these indicators to display!!!!!!!

Nobody can see anything of yours unless you decide to share it somehow. One way of sharing is to share all of your non-private tasks. This is the scenario where you would make a private folder. If you do not share, then you do not need to make private folders.

I have to agree with dontomp - it seems backwards. I'd prefer that things that *are* shared have visual markers rather than the other way around. That way, if there's a visual marker on something I don't want anyone else to see, it attracts my eye to go fix it! Otherwise the arrows are like having too many, too frequent reminders, you become immune to them & they no longer register in your mind. In fact, it's easier to miss the ones without the markers.

Love ya, Jake, mean it but FB has taught me that you should lock everything down to be on the safe side! Just sayin'...

P.S. It seems like it would take fewer system resources for TD to mark only the shared items instead of the private ones.

In order to know if a folder is shared, we have to check if you have sharing enabled, which includes checking for private collaboration, rss feeds enabled, iCal links enabled, and in the future perhaps other things. Its much easier to check if a folder is private and mark it as such.

Everything is private by default, even if you don't use private folders. Private folders are only needed when you have chosen to share all of your tasks with someone. It enables you to hide a few folders. It is not necessary to mark any of your folders private if you are not using our sharing tools.

"If you are using our collaboration tools, the 'private' checkbox will prevent tasks with that folder from being shared."

That suggests to me that if I want to collaborate with anyone, and I do, I have to remember to mark every folder with tasks I *don't* want to share as private. It suggests that any collaborator can see everything of mine unless I take action and hide it by marking the folder as private.

I hope I am wrong because I find that very counter-intuitive and it makes me reluctant to collaborate via Toodledo at all. What if I forget to hide a folder? What about tasks which have not been assigned a folder?

Just saw this:

"Private folders are only needed when you have chosen to share all of your tasks with someone"

What does that mean, specifically? That private folders are only needed if one has marked the checkbox to share all folders with a collaborator? Because that is not the same as just "using" your collaboration tools (see quote above).

When would someone want to share all their tasks with someone else anyway? For example, I expect most people want to use the same Toodledo account for both work-related and personal tasks. And isn't that what you want? How often do those spheres overlap with someone else's to make it useful for him/her to see all folders by default?

I don't use collaboration, but I might in the future. I do understand the concerns here, and I think it does make sense to have the private tag checked as the default. And with private being the default setting, it would then make sense to have the marker indicate shared (or not private) items.

The key factor here is privacy and it should be the default. (see Facebook outrage) The user should have to act to make something shared, not the other way around. Maybe there could be a checkbox on the various "Manage" pages like "Mark New Folders Private". Just my 2 cents.

Everything is private by default. You have to specifically turn on sharing to share anything. When you share with someone, you can give them selective access to individual folders. No other folders will be shared.

You can also choose to give them access to "all folders". If you choose this latter option then you can use "private folders" to hide a few of them. This is the purpose of private folders, so if you don't share "all folders" with anyone then you dont need private folders.

In order to know if a folder is shared, we have to check if you have sharing enabled, which includes checking for private collaboration, rss feeds enabled, iCal links enabled, and in the future perhaps other things. Its much easier to check if a folder is private and mark it as such.

Everything is private by default, even if you don't use private folders. Private folders are only needed when you have chosen to share all of your tasks with someone. It enables you to hide a few folders. It is not necessary to mark any of your folders private if you are not using our sharing tools.

Thanks for the advice. I made all my folders except two private when I tried out sharing with my daughter and her dad. I will "un-private" them to remove the annoying diamonds. I'm grateful for improvements to TD. However, the reasoning that it is easier for the developers to place diamonds next to folders marked private tells me that they probably need to step back and think like users rather than developers.

I agree with the other posters who would rather have a visual indicator for folders that are shared than the ones that are private -- Most people probably only share a few folders and assume that the rest are private. Marking the "super private" folders causes confusion. What difference is there between "super private" and "private"? There shouldn't be any effective difference. No one but me should be able to see my folders if I haven't shared them.

We are going to work on this to make it more clear how privacy works. What we have done just now is to remove the diamond from displaying in the lists, but we kept them in the sidebar and in the popup "edit folder" menus, which is where it is most important to know when something is private or not. This should reduce the visual overhead of seeing hundreds of diamonds in the list while retaining the information when it is needed.

My suggestion is to scrap the whole "Super Private concept. If sharing/collaboration really worked as I believe most users expect, i.e. noone can see anything of mine unless I authorize it, then there would be no need for "Super Private" folders, goals, tags, or whatever.